Allison Maslan shares strategies for scaling a business through customer journey design, team meetings, and systems that track metrics. She covers maintaining relationships, improving sales processes, and building a culture where bold, imperfect action drives revenue and profit.
Think about this. What if you had every customer that ever worked with you? Wow. Your business would be massive. You'd probably already be where you wanted to be. And so we designed a customer journey a few years ago and it really has made a difference now. These journeys are a living, breathing thing. They evolve, they change. You optimize them, you improve them, you come up with creative ideas, shake it up. And so there are so many ways to surprise and delight your customers. And we love to do that for our Pinnacle members. We send them gifts, all kinds of things that we do. From the moment that that someone starts to work with us, they're on that journey. It just shows your customers that they're your ambassadors and that they feel, they know that you care, that you're thinking about them and that they're important to you. Sending a thank you video, sending a discount code for members only. You can do awards, you can be introducing them to people, you know, gifts, all kinds of things like really have fun with this. But I will tell you, the more that you can get in front of your customer, the better. Even if they had a great experience with you, they're going to forget because they're busy, distracted, and there's all kinds of other things. So if you're not visible, they will forget about you. So you want to find ways to always be showing appreciation to them and let them know that you care. How many of you feel that your meetings are so frickin boring? You're like, oh my God. Well, I promise you there are people on your team that think they are boring. Maybe you're talking the whole time. Okay. So we have developed what we call our recurring meeting flow. Recurring meeting flow. So this came out of, we have tried so over the years, so many different meeting processes and I really just thought they were boring. I love collaboration. I want the person that never talks to be contributing. They have done studies to show that when people share what they're grateful for, happiness goes up like 25%. When a team together shares what they're grateful for, they will often talk about things in their personal life. I'm grateful for my grandmother, I'm grateful to that. I got to spend time with my kids. All of a sudden there starts to form a bond because people get to know what is important to them. Okay. So when we have these meetings, we bring personal things into them. Not too much or too long. We want to get to business. But when you create a bond and a connection from the beginning and the energy of the meeting changes, we also designed this to bring inspiration and bring everybody back to the why, to the vision. If you're just constantly meeting about the what's, it's disconnected from the why. When you bring everybody back to the why, you've got a more engaged group. Okay, calculate now we're going to talk numbers. The top of the meeting is numbers. What's the metrics? How many people signed up for this? How many, what are our numbers for sales for this? Now you all know you're going to know your North Star metrics. So everything, you're constantly tracking that week by week. So then when you are sharing your, you know, what's happened for the week prior, your going to be comparing and seeing where you're at. But somebody is in charge of gathering that data. When something falls apart, that means there's a step missing. So all we need to do is make sure that is added. So you need a systems driven culture. It saves time, it saves money. All right? And so if something were to happen to you or someone on the team, then you're not left high and dry because someone else can just step in and take it and run with it. So it takes time to build them. You're not going to do them all at once. And so also if no one's using the systems, it doesn't work. So just to create systems for the heck of creating systems that no one uses is kind of defeats the whole purpose. All right, so here are some of the things that hold people back in creating a system. I don't know how to do it. I don't have time. My system, my team doesn't follow directions. Start with last year's revenue and then your revenue goal for, for this next 12 months. Then you're going to break down the revenue streams. And the reason you're doing this is that your gross projected sales needs to match your revenue goal. So if you say I want to hit 10 million, where is it coming from? So I would want to know how much projected sales do you have for each of your revenue streams. The other thing that I want to know is pricing and your gross percentage profit. So, so what is really cool about this exercise is that you might find as you're doing this, if you just tweak your price one way up just a little bit, you might find that you don't need to sell as much as you thought you did to hit your goal. Sales. It's something you have to always be grooming and working on. Don't ever feel like, oh, we got sales, we got it down, it's always, it can always be improved on because sales is so much of it is psychology, right? Understanding how people think and really getting into their way of thinking and their, you know, their own pain that they're dealing with, building rapport. So there's a lot there. That's why we train. That's why we do our sales lab where we train people on sales. You want to keep an eye on the intended profit. So let's say, you know, yours is a million dollars of revenue. You want to have a target for your profit. Now some industries lend themselves to a higher net profit than others. Sometimes there's an average in an industry, sometimes an 8% profit is good and in others it's 20%, some people higher. So you're going to have some years that your profit might be lower or you might even have no profit. Now don't feel bad about that because there's some years in growth you're investing and some companies are just more focused on the overall revenue growth. So it really depends. But you definitely want to keep an eye to and have that profit goal. So as you are growing that you can keep that consistency. You want to focus on the highest impact activities first. We often procrastinate and try to do them last. Delegate, put accountability in place and let go. That's about building a team managed company and celebrate you all work so hard, like recognize all the accomplishments that you're doing and creating in your life. You know, as business owners we're like, okay, I really want this. And then you get there and you go, yeah, but I really want this. So just make sure that you recognize what you all have done and accomplish because it's a lot. And I love this quote. Life isn't meant to be lived perfectly, but merely to be lived boldly, wildly, beautifully, uncertainly, imperfectly, magically lived.
